Oracle Commerce and WebCenter Sites Integration Guidelines

Oracle Commerce &WebCenter Sites Integration August 2013 2 Table of Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 3 Executive Summary .......................................................................................................................... 3 Commerce Platform .......................................................................................................................... 4 Site Management ............................................................................................................................... 5 Catalog Management ....................................................................................................................... 5 Promotions Management ............................................................................................................... 7 Page and Customer Experience Management ...................................................................... 7 Personalization ................................................................................................................................ 10 Mobile .................................................................................................................................................. 10 Non-catalog Content Authoring ............................................................................................... 10 Summary ............................................................................................................................................ 11 3 Introduction With Oracle’s acquisition of ATG and Endeca (which together comprise the product solution named “Oracle Commerce”), and Fatwire (which has been renamed to “WebCenter Sites”), there have been many questions about how customers should use the three Oracle products together. The Oracle Commerce Product Management team has written this document to offer guidance for leveraging WebCenter Sites in a commerce environment in which the customer has Oracle Commerce. The contents of the document answer the most frequently asked questions and provide a foundation for discussions about the value of Oracle Commerce and WebCenter Sites and how best to leverage the technologies that comprise the overall solution in a commerce environment while aligning with the go-forward product strategy of the Oracle Commerce product. Purpose The purpose of this document is to document the best practices guidelines for leveraging WebCenter Sites in an environment which includes Oracle Commerce. Assumptions • The information in this document is based on the most recent Generally Available product versions: o Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10.2 o Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 o WebCenter Sites 11g • This document does not provide a comprehensive technical discussion and does not replace the official product documentation for any of the products. Executive Summary • The roadmap for Oracle Commerce focuses on the combined ATG & Endeca solution. Ideally customers should plan to use both technologies to operate their Commerce operations, although there may be cases where the full suite is implemented on a modular basis. The guidelines in this document are based on the existing product capabilities but influenced by the product roadmap. • In an Oracle Commerce implementation: o ATG and Endeca deliver the end-to-end customer experience, including delivering all customer experience, personalization and pages. o WebCenter Sites provides content management capabilities to support the customer experience, including the creation and distribution of marketing content. • This solution architecture ensures consistent customer engagement and unified management of the customer experience, including common personalization across touchpoints and channels. • Regardless of the type of customer or industry, if commerce is part of the solution requirements, the recommendation is the same as to which technologies should be used and their role in an Oracle Commerce implementation. • The following diagram represents the high level best practice architecture for an Oracle Commerce implementation: 4 Implementation & Migrati on • All Oracle Commerce customers should plan to use ATG Commerce and Endeca Experience Manager to operate their Commerce operations. (As noted, these may be implemented on a modular basis based on existing environments). This includes creating and managing site pages (i.e., use templates & cartridges to present content to shoppers), managing the product catalog, commerce functionality such as pricing and promotions, personalization, and search and guided navigation. • Oracle Commerce customers should plan to use WebCenter Sites to create and manage certain content, such as articles, press releases, images, etc. This content will then be available to include in the site experience via integration with ATG or Experience Manager, depending on the type of content (catalog versus non-catalog). Commerce Platform The bulk of commerce-specific functionality in an Oracle Commerce implementation is delivered by Oracle ATG Web Commerce. This includes functionality such as: Pricing • Contract, product, SKU, or volume-based (bulk and tiered) pricing • Custom price lists for specific accounts or region, selling season, or any custom-defined segment • Flexible promotions/coupons (see “Promotions Management” below) • Product comparisons • Gift list/wish list/purchase list • Gift certificates and couponing 5 Shopping Cart • Saved shopping carts • Tracking of shopping cart abandonment • “Save-for-later” functionality with the cart • Cart visibility across multiple channels Ordering • Order capture • Approvals workflow • Order restrictions • Recurring/scheduled orders/purchase orders • Requisitions • Inventory Integration o Inventory lookups, potentially from multiple systems, including support for retail store holds, in-store pickup, and visibility to store stock position o Customizable rates for inventory refresh, including support for real-time (or near real- time) Payment • Support for multiple payment methods, shipping addresses, and cost centers per line item • Integration with fraud detection, tax, credit card transaction processing Shipping • Line item independence, cost centers, multiple shipping addresses, multiple billing addresses Site Management Commerce enterprises require that their business users, to the largest extent possible, are able to quickly and easily set up online storefronts. This includes the ability to create and manage multiple storefronts that may share a centrally managed common infrastructure, but with distinct presentation, product assortment, and business rules. Support for multiple sites should be at the architectural level, without requiring replication of store sites and business processes. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage and deliver sites. Catalog Management A key requirement for commerce enterprises is robust support for catalog management. Some of the main features that are needed include: • Support for multiple catalogs. The product should allow the creation of multiple brand and/or regional catalogs. Catalogs should be able to be shared across multiple sites and stores, and modified at a local level where required. • Support for all data types (including business and technical definitions, documentation, pricing, business rules, etc.). • Providing validation to ensure data quality and consistency. • Managing all product definitions, including product bundles or configurable products, effective dates, etc. • Pricing, including list and sale prices, and complex pricing models such as volume-based pricing (by site or customer segment), and dynamic price calculation. 6 • Assembling the product hierarchy. The product catalog should support both fixed hierarchies (e.g., categories) and dynamic structure based on criteria. The product should also support integration with third-party systems to derive category assignments. • Managing business rules relating to offers, including options, add-on’s, upgrades, etc. • Support for cross-sell, up-sell, and substitute-sell: o The selection of cross-sell and up-sell products that are displayed should be able to be: fixed, based on merchandise specification; dynamic, based on customer rules (order history, quantities, geography, etc.); and automated (i.e., supplied via a recommendations engine). o It should be possible to exclude products that aren't available to the buyer. o It should be possible to create dynamic product groups based on some criteria (e.g., products with certain user ratings; products with certain features; etc.) in order to more efficiently manage cross-sells and up-sells. • Supporting the modeling of information for all enterprise applications (CRM, pricing, ordering, fulfillment, etc.). • Image management, including image production workflow and integration. • User-generated content (UCG). The product should support content supplied by users such as ratings, reviews, and tags. • Ability to integrate with third-party repositories. • Support for multi-user environments, including providing role-based authorization, workflow, and data access control. • Allowing users to preview changes made to the product catalog, including dynamic and personalized content, and to stage deployment of the catalog. • Publishing the catalog, including support for schedule-based publishing, and the expiration of catalogs, individual categories, and/or products. • Versioning and rollback capabilities. A full history of all changes should be tracked and available for auditing. • Enabling easy integration with external systems. • Automatically updating search, campaign management, and call center tools with changes made to the catalog. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage the majority of the content and presentation of the catalog. In general, the ATG Business Control Center (BCC) is used to manage catalog information, and Endeca Experience Manager is used to manage which catalog content is presented and the customer experience (CX) on the site. Non-catalog content (e.g., content that is associated with a particular page, but not with a particular product), such as an article, banner, etc., can be well-suited to being managed in WebCenter Sites. WebCenter Sites provides a flexible asset model that developers can use to create assets for these types of content, e.g., documents, images, videos, etc. WebCenter Sites could be used to create the asset. Endeca Experience Manager can then retrieve the asset for a particular page via an Experience Manager cartridge. There are certain types of catalog content that can also be managed with WebCenter Sites and integrated with the products managed in ATG. For example, you may have a document such as a PDF, or an image, and that you want to associate with a product. Again, WebCenter Sites can be used to create the asset. These assets can then be used with Oracle Web Commerce through integration with ATG Web Commerce and selected by a user in the ATG BCC to associate with a particular product. 7 Promotions Management In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage the bulk of promotions functionality, and WebCenter Sites to create imagery and other media to associate with promotions. There are a couple of different aspects to promotions in Oracle Commerce: • The actual promotions logic itself that performs calculations for the pricing of customer orders. Promotions allow you to offer discounts on specific products or groups of products. They specify options that define the conditions a customer must meet before qualifying for the discount, and how the discount is applied. For example, you may specify that in order to be eligible for a discount, a customer must purchase an item from the Outerwear category, that they spend more than $50, or that they make their purchase during J uly. This functionality is provided by ATG Commerce. • Imagery and other media that are used to notify a customer that they are eligible for a promotion. For example, you might decide to promote a range of products for Mother’s Day by highlighting them with an image on your site’s “Welcome!” page and offering a 10 percent discount if customers order them by a specific date. Or you might want to e-mail new customers a promotion to encourage return visits. This imagery can be managed within WebCenter Sites. It is important to note that these aspects are not inherently related. When you create a promotion – including defining the requirements for qualifying for the discount, how the discount is applied, for how long, etc. – then that promotion will be granted to any customers who qualify for the promotion. This will occur whether or not any imagery is included on the site that notifies the customer of the promotion. Typically, however, media items such as images or banners will be created for promotions in order to entice the shopper to use the promotion. Oracle Commerce also provides support for coupons. A standard coupon has a single associated code that can be used to claim that coupon, which is often widely distributed to customers (a common example is a coupon that grants free shipping to users during the holidays). In other situations, you may want to restrict the use of coupons, which can be accomplished through the use of a coupon batch; the coupon batch generates a random authentication code for each individual coupon, to ensure that the coupon cannot be passed on to other customers. Page and Customer Experience Management A growing requirement for commerce enterprises is the ability for business users to create new pages and edit existing ones, for customer-facing web sites. Pages are created using templates that have been created by site developers that preserve the key design features of the site, while allowing business users to control which content is presented on every page, as well as its layout and presentation. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage and deliver sites. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce – and in particular Endeca Experience Manager – for page and customer experience management. This is due to the fact that the page and customer management features for each solution are tightly tied to that solution actually delivering the site. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the ATG application server will own the session, runtime, and rendering (when applicable), and there are already productized integration points between ATG and Endeca. Endeca Experience Manager 8 page authoring capabilities do not interfere with ATG’s session, runtime, and rendering capabilities as Experience Manager separates the content assembly from the presentation delivery and rendering. Experience Manager returns a semantic model of all the assembled content for a particular context (e.g, landing page, search term, category page, etc.), and hands this over to the ATG runtime environment. In addition, in order to personalize the shopper’s experience – including presenting the right content, applying the correct promotions, etc. – information must be known about the shopper’s state (their profile, their cart, etc.) which can then be passed to Endeca. ATG maintains all of this information, which can be used to personalize shoppers’ experiences, including multistage scenarios that are triggered from specific customer actions on the site. Endeca Experience Manager employs templates of pre-built templates which determine where content and data is placed and how it should be rendered. Experience Manager uses prebuilt, modular components called “cartridges” that pull in content and data from the Endeca engine, as well as (optionally) from external systems. Cartridges contain information about content to be displayed in the application, but also typically encapsulate the configuration for a particular feature, such as a Guided Navigation component, spotlight, or results list. The configuration model for a cartridge is defined by a cartridge template, which describes the properties that can be configured as well as the interface through which the content administrator can specify their values in Experience Manager. Cartridges typically have configuration options specific to the cartridge's function, such as the number of refinements to display (and the order in which to display them) for a Dimension Navigation cartridge; the records to promote for a Spotlight cartridge; or the sort options and records per page for a Results List cartridge. (See image). Image 2 Experience Manager comes with several out-of-the-box cartridges that perform various functions. It also provides an SDK that allows a customer’s technical staff to build their own cartridges, depending on the specific needs of their business. Here are some examples of cartridges and the functionality that they provide. 9 Search Box cartridge. The Search Box cartridge provides site visitors with an interface for using keyword search in an application. The Search Box cartridge can also be configured to display auto-suggest results. The user can enable this feature by selecting the appropriate option that is available to them when they open this cartridge. Dimension Navigation cartridge. The Dimension Navigation cartridge displays dimension refinements for Guided Navigation, i.e., the properties that are used for guided navigation on a web site (size, color, price, etc.). There are several configuration options for this cartridge, such as the order in which to show the selected dimensions; the ability to set a limit to the number of dimension refinements shown and to then display a “More” link that allows customers to display additional refinements; and the ability to “boost or bury” certain refinements, e.g., perhaps the customer wants certain brands to be returned when users either search for a product, or when they navigate to a certain section of the web site; etc. Record Spotlight cartridge. The Record Spotlight cartridge highlights featured or dynamic records to a site visitor. The cartridge can be placed in the sidebar to show special deals, highly-rated products, or any other category of featured record results. It can be configured to display the same items across the entire site by including it in a dynamic slot cartridge, or set to restrict results to the current navigation state by tailoring the list of featured records based on the landing page that the cartridge appears on. These are just a few examples of the out-of-the-box cartridges provided with Experience Manager, and they illustrate the variety of functionality and business logic that may be encapsulated in a cartridge. There has also been a substantial amount of product-supported integration done between ATG Web Commerce and Endeca Commerce in recent releases of each product. This has included the creation of multiple ATG-specific cartridges that can be used in Experience Manager. Examples of these cartridges include: Category Products Grid cartridge. This cartridge retrieves the ordered list of products from a category that has been created and populated in ATG Merchandising. This ensures that the products will appear in the exact order that they have been set by the merchandiser in Merchandising, as opposed to being retrieved dynamically based on a rule. Product Spotlight Targeter. This cartridge returns the content of a targeter defined in the ATG Business Control Center (BCC). In this way, users able to use ATG’s powerful personalization capabilities, but control the placement of content on pages in Experience Manager. Category Related Products. This cartridge displays an ordered list of products to be displayed on a category page as “related products” (typically used for cross- or up-sell purposes), by retrieving the Related Products for a category that have been populated by a user in ATG Merchandising. Again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but is referenced to show the variety of cartridges that have been created, including cartridges built specifically for use with ATG Web Commerce. 10 Image 3 Personalization In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use the personalization capabilities of Oracle Commerce (both ATG and Endeca). Since both ATG and Endeca Commerce’s solutions provide personalization capabilities, decisions also need to be made about when to use the features of each product. Each solution provides a set of tools to determine the content to show, with each tool having slightly different capabilities. For details about when to use which technology (ATG or Endeca), please refer to the document “ATG-Endeca Integration Best Practice Recommendations”. Mobile In the context of commerce is it critical to align the mobile and desktop sites in order to deliver consistent shopper experiences and minimize operational and deployment requirements. In an Oracle Commerce implementation, the best practice is to use Oracle Commerce to manage and deliver sites and therefore, it is recommended to use the Oracle Commerce mobile solution. Non-catalog Content Authoring WebCenter Sites provides the best business user tooling for authoring non-catalog content; thus our recommendation is to use WebCenter Sites for the authoring of such content. As noted previously in the document, WebCenter Sites provides a flexible asset model that developers can use to create assets for various types of content, such as documents, images, videos, etc. The content to be managed depends on the nature of the organization: e.g., you may create articles, photos, and video clips; manage job postings; etc. Developers can create many 11 different asset types, giving a company an appropriate range and type of content to create and publish. Each asset type has its own content entry form, with a unique set of fields. Asset types created in WebCenter Sites can utilize native WebCenter Sites functionality such as an image picker, which allows the user to visually choose an image asset from a list of thumbnails to associate with the asset they are creating or editing. WebCenter Sites also offers the Clarkii Online Image Editor, which allows you to edit an image directly in an asset in Form Mode. For example, you can use Clarkii OIE to crop and rotate an image. These assets can then be used with Oracle Web Commerce through integration with an appropriate Endeca Experience Manager cartridge. For example, an article created in WebCenter Sites might be placed on a page managed by Experience Manager. The business user would select a cartridge in Experience Manager that was created to handle this asset type; place the cartridge on the page; and configure it to retrieve its content from the appropriate article. Content that is created in WebCenter Sites can also be dynamically retrieved and placed on a page by virtue of indexing any meta data that is associated with a WebCenter Sites managed asset. Summary Oracle has made significant investment in best of breed technologies focused on delivering differentiated customer experiences. In addition to continued investment in each of these product platforms, Oracle will continue to further integrate the capabilities to provide a seamless business user experience and simplified operation environment. As evidenced by this best practices document, Oracle is also committed to providing customers with guidance on how to best leverage Oracle products in a manner which is consistent with the product strategy and roadmap. Given the strength and flexibility of both the Oracle Commerce and WebCenter Sites solutions, customers can choose to leverage the products in many different ways and in different environments. The approach defined in this document is focused on providing guidance when customers are engaged in commerce and driving compelling customer experiences via digital channels. For additional information on Oracle’s Customer Experience solutions, please visit http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/customer-experience/overview/index.html.